Kudos for your excellent editorial, ‘How
prepared is your household for an emergency,’ January 30, Page 4. Regardless of
one’s opinion on the cause of the extreme weather currently challenging the
planet, it’s a practical consideration to prepare one’s household for even a
short-term breakdown in our fragile infrastructure. Beyond questioning our
government selling Canadian farmers down the proverbial river, giving
preference to the cheap import of foreign goods at the expense of Canadian food
providers, buying local is a good policy. Eating less readymade food and more
home cooked meals, putting in a garden and a stock of water and non-perishable
food items, and considering the purchase of a backup generator and a wood
stove, are all reasonable considerations.

I am especially inspired by the challenge
that the North Bay couple have embraced, as described in the ‘Big Wild Year
Notebook – Part I of a series’ by Warren Schlote. All the best to Delphanie
Colyer and her partner Jeremy St. Onge for embarking on a year of eating only
food they either hunt or forage. I am looking forward to following their
adventure. As a retired construction contractor, this parallels my own ambition
to build an “earth house” and an “earth greenhouse,” also called a Walipini.
(The low tech Walipini was originally developed by the South American Aymara
people of Bolivia and Chile, which they claim helped them survive the last ice
age by being able to grow vegetables all year round.)

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Endless debate in the media has not slowed
corporate lobbyists from stepping up their program to confuse the populace with
misleading authoritative studies and flooding the media with self-important
pundits attempting to justify a denial of the reality of climate change. Rather
than recognizing the global concensus among environmental scientists, from more
than a century of existing study, the result from our fearless political
leaders, (in Canada and south of the border), has been the dismantling of
programs that recognize the impending consequences of the planets infatuation
with fossil fuel and high tech farming strategies, at least partially,
responsible for global warming. To prepare for the very real consequences of
extreme weather our government should be investing our tax dollars in a rural self-sufficiency
program that might actually help our citizenry prepare for the unthinkable.